As we head into a new year, I am doing my best to leave unproductive traits in the past. One of those unproductive traits is an unwillingness to cross the “t’s” and dot the “i’s” on items that I don’t necessarily want to keep front and center in my life. By correcting this, I hopefully improve completeness of communication and acknowledge those who have contributed their time and effort on my behalf. While I know it is the right thing to do, up until this evening, I couldn’t bring myself to go back to that very ugly place, the death of our cat and family member, Wally.
My last posting on Wally’s situation occurred on Thanksgiving shortly after the Rockland Road Runners Turkey trot. Cindy and I spent the following week continuing to fight on Wally’ behalf even after his death. What follows is a post that I wrote originally on November 26th but simply couldn’t bring myself to publish. Since then friends have asked me what finally happened and I have been reticent to tell them. Additionally, people like Bob Lorsch, Robert Strang, and Bruce Doniger really went out of their way on our behalf and they deserve to be recognized for their efforts. To our old and new friends and family members who have repeatedly demonstrated that humanity does exist in the way that it was intended, both Cindy and I hope that we will someday be able to properly or adequately thank you. Publishing this, is our first step toward trying to do just that.
November 26, 2007
Positive change is borne by the sacrifice of innocents
And so it was with Wally. To recount the activities of the past six days would be a struggle for me. I’m simply exhausted, as is Cindy. The good news, if there is such a thing as good news, is that Wally’s head has been reunited with his body. Yes, we had to struggle and bend wills to do this but in the end we have succeeded in battling for our dear friend who was not able to do so himself. The goal now is to take back what was taken from us, not Wally’s head, but our ability to quietly reflect, remember and mourn the loss of our dear family member.
Before I go on, I have to state that this experience created multiple opportunities for us to test all of our values, our beliefs and any concepts we previously held of right and wrong, fairness, common sense, the greater good, community, death, public health, purpose, friendship, family, trust, faith and will. We spent every minute of our Thanksgiving weekend chasing down any avenue that we could to rectify the situation hoping something would stick. We reached out to vets, pet advocacy groups, medical ethics associations, the media, friends, attorneys, lobbyists, large economic contributors, and politicians including Mayor Bloomberg himself. For everyone who contributed their thoughts, suggestions, prayers and contacts, both Cindy and I will never forget.
This is the second time in less than a year that my friends and extended family have come to my aid, the first time unsolicited and this time without perhaps understanding the importance as to why. Still they supported us unquestionably and in many cases without any realistic hope of success. We were told by every agency, every public employee, every vet that there was no way we would ever get Wally’s head back, and yet we pushed on. I reflected more than once on a conversation between my friends Timmy Higgins and Barry Schneider who reminded me in Chicago in October that “no” was just the opening of a conversation to allow you to get what your want or to do what you know needs to be done. As gruesome, as barbaric as this action was, I heard the word “no” relentlessly - so many times in the past six days that I think I don’t need to hear it ever again the rest of my life. In the end, however it was Bob Lorsch who once again came to the rescue of those who could no longer fight for themselves. Protecting and fighting on behalf of those who cannot has always been a core belief of Bob’s, and we were so very lucky to have him on our side.
Through this experience, I have gone to places in this city that you’ll never want to visit. I have called on favors and given out countless more. And in the end, I have learned more about NYC bureaucracy than I ever wanted to learn.
Again not wanting to bury the lead, I’ll begin with the cast of characters who were involved in some way and without whom, we would have been able to succeed in what others have described as our quixotic quest.
- Shisheer Bhatta
- Dr. Philip Fox
- Dr. Ed Butts
- Norma Torres
- Robert Strang
- Nat Smith
- Bruce Doniger
- Lydia and Claudia Delman
- Robert Lorsch
The unfortunate part is that without these people, we would not have retrieved Wally’s head and while it doesn’t change the fact that our cat died after a brave and horrible battle, our memory of him would have been severely changed. We owe these people our utmost gratitude, but the average pet owner shouldn’t have to rely on the notion that we were lucky enough to know a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew the head of NYC Department of Health to do something that was simply common sense and founded in the core principles of humanity. In the end, the decision to retrieve Wally’s head lay with one person, Norma Torres. But it took phone calls and e-mails from her former boss, and from countless others on our behalf to do what was undeniably right. We are incredibly grateful that Norma was a person with compassion and acted as a human being first and a bureaucrat second. As it was, to retrieve Wally’s head, we had to go to the Bureau of Labs in NYC, one of the most secure buildings in the city. Armed guards outside of the building and inside of the building made us jump through a series of hoops before we were led upstairs to a cold gray lab where an Indian lab tech was keeping Wally’s head in a small brown cardboard box in a seemingly ordinary refrigerator. He frowned when I came in as if my actions were an unwelcome disruption in his normal routine. I asked him why they couldn’t return the heads of the animals after they completed their barbaric rabies tests, obviously if they came up negative. His response was, that they’ve already been in this building and in this lab. Basically he was saying that once inside the lab anything could be contaminated, to which I asked him, how did he go home at night and shouldn’t they be careful not to mix the potential rabies specimens with the other viruses and agents that they test? He simply didn’t get it, didn’t understand, and quite frankly didn’t care. He said that if it wasn’t for the high powered players intervening on our behalf, he never would have done this for us. It was clear that he was happy that it was all over. To complete the picture of his lack of sensitivity, he took the cardboard box and placed it into a plastic bag for me to carry - a Chinese food take-out bag that he pulled out of his trash can. Beyond the irony of that, I can promise you that Wally would have never settled for anything less than Tiffany & Co..
This entire episode was avoidable. It’s as simple as that. It started with Dr. Valerie Parker not doing her job and not taking adequate precautions to ensure that the lab techs at the Animal Medical Center were wearing protective clothing whole an obviously sick and unhappy cat was having his lungs poked with needles. If she had done this, especially after Cindy and I pleaded with her to make sure that she would, this never would have happened. When Cindy finally called her and told her what happened, this doctor did not even know that cutting off the animal’s head was part of the procedure. This ignorance and apathy is unconscionable. Then it goes to the lab tech herself who completed the forms to notify the department of animal health that she had been scratched. No shit! Cat’s scratch. That’s what they do and if you haven’t figured it out and properly protect yourself then you shouldn’t be in this line of work. Until these people are faced with the consequences of their actions and trained accordingly, they’ll keep behaving this way and others will suffer. The response we received from the administrators at AMC was that was the process. That’s the same answer we received from the Department of Animal Health. I’m pretty much sick of that answer.
Hollywood has made hundreds of million of dollars showing what happens when you take the human factor out of a process, and I guess it’s my curse that all parts of my professional life revolve around the simple concept that all change relies on people. This was an example where the protocols - the Department of Health’s fancy and much more rigid word for processes - were created to reduce or eliminate human involvement and presumably human error. Similarly, countless examples have been shown how doing this is a poor and inadequate replacement for proper training and effective management.
As a coach, I pride myself in my ability to make halftime changes, to adapt to changing circumstances and to innovate and improvise where it makes sense to do so. The elements encountered along this path are built on policies and while policies have their champions, I’ve never been a fan of them. I’ve also never been a fan of rules because I find rules to be a poor excuse for guidance in the absence of intelligence and common sense. I’m a much bigger fan of guiding principles based on core values, supported by intelligent people with a healthy balance of logic and human emotions.
I had a recent conversation with a family member of Cindy’s. She works in the public school system and finds me to be an enigma at best and a dissident at worst. I suppose she is right. I am a disrupter, but not just to disrupt, but because times change and conditions vary and to do things as individuals or groups that harm humanity regardless of the underlying premise makes no sense to me.
Policies and rules are made by people, and people have a lens through which they view the world. They make mistakes and often cannot envision implications beyond the facts and circumstances of their condition. So when someone comes in and questions the premise behind a rule or policy the easy way out is to simply say, “No”. I have found in most cases, when I ask why a policy is in place, who is it meant to protect, what behaviors is it meant to promote and what conditions may not be included in the original interpretation, I am met with either blind ignorance, a quick fabrication without basis or substantiation, or most often, the sardonic, who cares look, and it’s always been done that way and I’m sure they had their reasons explanation.
So it was that Wally took on the NYC Department of Health without even knowing that he would. Just as if we were running a marathon, Cindy and I continue to do the same thing, we take one step after another. As I work in my office I look up frequently at a photo of Wally that sits on my desk. It’s a photo of him as the twenty pound brute that we knew and loved courtesy of a generous gift from our friend Erin. Each night before we go to sleep, we can be seen staring at a photo of Wally as a kitten. We close our eyes and we think of Wally. We see his face and feel his coat. We hear him purring in our ears and feel him drooling on our faces as he so often would in his own way to get as close to us as possible. And we realize that he is now beyond pain and torture, that he is beyond the confines of his own sick and failing body. Regardless of what they have done to him, he is at peace. Good night mean kitty. Good night.
